Two Ways at Once

The fry cook had yellow stains on his fingers, a black t-shirt with no sleeves, grey hair tucked under a scally cap. He grunted at me when I sat down at the counter, slid me a mug, topped it with smoking coffee before turning his back on me to shovel a mess of something around the griddle.

The coffee wasn’t good but it was hot. I sipped it and waited on a menu, studied the black flecks on the silverware

“Christ, Arlene, get the guy a menu,” he said.

“All right, all right, gimme a break. Arlene hurried over with a sheet of laminated cardstock, rearranging something in her apron pocket as she came. “Sorry, I’m still kinda new. More coffee?”

I thought maybe she’d rushed the makeup that morning. New? She had skin like old china, lines no amount of anything would ever fill in. “Sure, and pancakes,” I said, handing the menu back.

She wrote it down, pancakes, and read it to the cook. “Pancakes.”

“I heard him, I heard him.”

They wore on bickering as I read the paper. A man had been stabbed outside Corrigan’s pub the night before, something about a football bet and too much alcohol. I knew the place: a locals’ bar, you could get a B&B there...beer and a beating. Menino was still mayor and winter was still on the way in. Nothing changes.

The guy down the counter was wearing white-spattered jeans and his shirt had a drywall company logo. The cook dished the mess off the griddle at him. Eggs, maybe. He started wolfing them.

“Hot in here,” the cook grumbled. “You think it’s too hot?”

“I think it’s nice,” I said, “after being in that damp outside.”

Arlene was polishing the meat slicer. “It’s gorgeous out there. Hey, how do you get this cover off to clean the blade?” she asked the cook.

“I’ll take care of it. Take it outside, maybe let the rain wash it off.” He chuckled.

“Yeah, fry cook’s a hot job,” said Drywall. “I did it for four years before I got started in houses.”

“What’s that like? Good money?” The cook came out with a screwdriver, started backing the screws out of the slicer’s chrome cover.

“Not bad; I just bought a little place—a shell, burned out—for one-twenty and flipped it for one-fifty.”

“How long it take you?”

“Five months. Best money I’ve made since...uh...yeah, it’s good money.”

Arlene picked up my paperback, studied the tangle-headed youth on the cover. “I never liked this guy,” she said. “Or that Baez girl, either.” There was a silver cross on a chain weighing on her neck.

“He’s a hell of a writer,” I told her. “Regardless how you feel about his songs.”

She shivered. “Uck. Paul Anka, now there was a songwriter.”

I caught the word “recovery” out of one ear. “—and sober for five years and four months now,” Drywall was saying to the cook.

“Can I get a clean fork?” I asked Arlene.

She turned around and reached for a rolled-up napkin without missing a beat, placed it just so. “I hated how he toyed with people’s feelings. How he kept disappearing.”

“Well, I think that’s because he hated the life,” I said, straining my attention two ways at once. “He writes about that, how you can sell things you can never buy back. Privacy, for one.”

Drywall was leaning over his plate talking intently to the cook, who had put down the screwdriver, was resting his elbows on the counter rolling a toothpick between his teeth.

“One of the guys at my meetings, Navy guy, told me he liked how I handled myself,” Drywall said. “Hired me on to cook breakfast at his place. Even gave me the keys to the restaurant.”

“Oh, I know, that’s a temptation,” said the cook.

“I was like, all that beer in the basement! Those kegs. And that cash drawer!”

“Mmm-hmmph.”

Arlene put my book down, tapped the counter in front of me. “That’s true, y’know...I watch that biography channel, and that’s the first thing any of ‘em say. How they just want to have normal lives, be Joe Schmoe again.”

I nodded. “Joe Schmoe: the most looked-up-to man in America.”

“Pancakes up,” said the cook. “Arlene.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She frowned, fetched them.

The pancakes were heavy, glue-hearted, and Arlene gave me a helpless shot of syrup in a little steel pitcher. I dumped it in the plate.

“—an honor, to get trusted like that after—” The cook coughed.

He had a vein like a millipede burrowing under the skin of his arm and I looked down at my pancakes, suddenly ashamed for eavesdropping. There was a hair or a thread or something leaking out of one of them. I scraped it to one side. Arlene topped off my mug again. I opened my book, chewed